AS HE WAS LEAVING ON ANOTHER risky mission to China last month, human-rights activist Harry Wu offered Sue Howell, the assistant who was accompanying him, some advice on how to survive a Chinese interrogation. "Play it like a game," he said. "They insist you give them something. You resist, then give a little. But you get in trouble if you give everything at once or if you refuse to cooperate." Wu must now follow his own counsel, since the Chinese arrested him on that trip. But his words might also be useful to the U.S., whose relations with China seem to worsen week by week. A disciplined strategy of resisting, but giving a little, may be just what the U.S. needs.
The arrest of Wu, 58, is itself the latest source of conflict between the two countries. The son of a Shanghai banker, he was imprisoned in 1960 for criticizing the Soviet Union. After being released, immigrating to the U.S. in 1985 and becoming a citizen, he embarked on a crusade to publicize the nightmare of China's prison system. Using a hidden camera, he once sneaked into a Chinese tanning factory and filmed naked prisoners standing in vats of toxic chemicals. Last year, while he posed as a wealthy American searching for a kidney for a relative, the BBC filmed transplant recipients who told Wu that their organs had come from executed prisoners.
The Chinese government will do almost anything to keep such information secret. Last month Wu was detained after trying to cross into China with his U.S. passport at a remote customs post on the Kazakhstan border. Chinese authorities waited until July 8 to announce his arrest on charges that will include disclosing "state secrets" to "foreign organizations," a crime that could carry the death penalty. Howell, who was returned to Kazakhstan after being detained with Wu for a few days, says he didn't resent the guards. "Harry kept saying, 'They're just doing their job. They're not bad people. They're caught up in the system too.'" Last week Wu was finally allowed a visit by an American consular official, to whom Wu reported that he had not been tortured.
Wu is caught in the middle as the world's sole superpower and the world's most populous country snipe at each other. The list of recent incidents is considerable. Congress has introduced resolutions condemning China's "acts of aggression" in territorial disputes over the Spratly Islands. A CIA report last May said China might deserve sanctions because it sold ballistic-missile components to Iran and Pakistan. The U.S. is holding up China's application for membership in the World Trade Organization. And the U.S. recognition last week of Vietnam, China's neighbor and frequent enemy, fuels Beijing's fears that Washington has malign strategic intentions.
By far the biggest controversy arose in May when President Clinton responded to Taiwan's congressional supporters and allowed Taiwan's President, Lee Teng-hui, to visit the U.S. Clinton's foreign-policy advisers were unanimously opposed to the visit, and the Chinese treated it as an abrogation of the fundamental tenet of U.S.-China relations--that there is "one China." Enraged, Beijing retaliated by pulling out its ambassador to the U.S. "We expected a reaction," says a State Department official, "but we were surprised by its ferocity."